Last week he proposed that Congress repeal the debt ceiling, a spending limit based on a 1917 law that was intended to facilitate the issuance of bonds during World War I but has turned into a perilous, nauseating opportunity for political shenanigans.

One hundred years is enough.

Yes, “debt ceiling” sounds good: It sounds like a hard cap on spending that forces lawmakers in Washington to sharpen their collective pencils when crafting the federal budget.

Some politicians have favorably compared the debt ceiling to a credit limit on a Visa card — a check on runaway spending that forces you to live closer to your means.

But the name debt ceiling, like the analogy, is deceiving. In practice, the debt ceiling is an artificial threshold that the U.S. Treasury periodically approaches as it attempts to pay obligations already incurred.

In the credit card example, it’s as though the credit limit applied only after you ran up all your charges. Fine, but you’ve effectively spent the money already and somehow you have to meet your obligations, just like Congress does.

And for Congress to pay its outstanding bills when the debt ceiling looms — Medicare reimbursements, tax refunds and military salaries among them — members must then vote to raise that ceiling, which they’ve done more than 100 times over the years.

The only other option when the debt is about to break through the ceiling is a metastatic national default, one that would grind to a halt much of day-to-day government, rattle the global economy and threaten “the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits,” as Republican President Ronald Reagan warned in a radio address 30 years ago this month. “Interest rates would skyrocket. Instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar.”

Unthinkable! And yet it’s the very unthinkable nature of such a crisis that inspires opportunists in Congress to use the threat of failing to raise the debt ceiling for political leverage and partisan advantage.

"America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership,” as one sanctimonious U.S. senator said in March 2006. “Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit."

That senator was Illinois Democrat Barack Obama, trying to use the threat to filibuster against raising the debt ceiling to extract concessions from Republicans who, then as now, controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.

Obama had to eat those words when he became president in 2009 and Republicans began using similarly sanctimonious rhetoric to extract concessions from him. The game of budget chicken got so intense at one point that serious people were suggesting Obama should delay the day of reckoning by ordering the minting of a $1 trillion platinum coin or that he should provoke a constitutional crisis by ordering the Treasury to ignore the debt limit law.

Democrats railed back against the Republican econo-terrorists and their hostage-taking ways. But now that Democrats are out of power, they have refused to agree to extend the debt ceiling by a year and a half, as Republicans wanted. Instead they talked Trump into a mere three-month extension tied to hurricane relief funding, a move that will allow them to brandish this virtual gun on Capitol Hill again in December.

The policy outcomes will probably be to my liking. But the means to those ends will be wrong, in the same way it’s always been wrong for members of either party to issue the reckless threat to precipitate a national catastrophe in order to achieve policy outcomes to their liking.

Nothing about the debt ceiling has ever reined in federal spending — to wit, on Sept. 8 the national debt surpassed the $20 trillion threshold for the first time. It’s just a vestigial barrier that lends itself mainly to hypocrisy and to deflecting the responsibility for reasonable appropriations, a responsibility properly exercised when the budgets are made, not when the bills are coming due.

“For many years people have been talking about getting rid of the debt ceiling altogether,” as Trump told reporters last week, “There are lots of good reasons to do that.”